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David Beisel’s Perspective on Digital Change

Continued Conversation about Angel Bloggers

David Beisel
June 13, 2005 · 2  min.

My post last week, “VCs and Angels, Where are the Angel Bloggers?” generated quite a bit of interest and notable discussion. According to my Feedburner stats, more of my readers (on a percentage basis) clicked-through this entry than any other post to date. More importantly, others joined shared their own thoughts. Recently Fred Wilson commented that he wished he could “elevate the really good [comments] with links back to the original posts.” I would like to do that here, too. But since raising trackbacks and comments isn’t an option now with Moveable Type, and I want to facilitate a true discussion in my blog as opposed to a one-way monologue, I am going to highlight some of the highlights of the conversations that emerged in response to this post.

The question at hand is: if VCs are prolific bloggers, why aren’t angel investors as well? Why aren’t there more visible angel bloggers? Paul Kedrosky echoed my inquiry, “While I’ve written before about the surprising (at least to me) number of venture bloggers, that number doesn’t include angels, of which I can think of, well, something like none.”

Jeff Clavier notes that “quite a few VCs will double as Angel bloggers.” And he also names a number of high-profile angel investors, “Mark Cuban, Esther Dyson, Joe Kraus, Loic Le Meur, Joi Ito, Nick Denton, Mark Pincus, Andrew Anker.” Yes, these individuals aren’t doing angel investing a primary pursuit, but they do actively participate.

Ed Nusbaum of Ventureblogs commented, “most angels don’t blog about their investing since they try to avoid the hassle of being overly visible.”

B Watson theorized, “I think that blogging is still a little new and cutting edge for most of the angel community out there.”

In sum, it seems that the bloggers who do make angel investments are engaged in other activities that leads them to blog as well. Angel investing isn’t their main subject matter. And for the others, it sounds like there is value in keeping a low profile as an angel investor that VCs weigh with other tradeoffs. Or perhaps some angels are still coming up to speed on the idea of joining the blogging community. If the latter is the case, then I am looking forward to seeing more angels blogging in the near future.

Any other thoughts or ideas out there?

UPDATE: I’d highly recommend reading the follow-up comments to this post.


David Beisel
Partner
I am a cofounder and Partner at NextView Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital firm championing founders who redesign the Everyday Economy.